Pochette officielle — XL Recordings
Fontaines D.C. are shaking things up. On September 30, the Irish band released “Tongue,” the sixth track off their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, due October 16 on XL Recordings. The album announcement back in mid-September already made headlines for another reason: the tracklist confirmed a Rosalía feature on “Where Is Gone?” — the first time the band has credited an outside guest on one of their records.
A band that grew up fast
Formed in Dublin in 2017, Fontaines D.C. broke through with their critically acclaimed debut Dogrel in 2019, before following up with A Hero’s Death and then Skinty Fia, which earned a Mercury Prize nomination. It’s been a steady climb since, marked by ever-bigger tours and a songwriting voice — Grian Chatten’s — that has kept its edge even as the production around it has grown more polished.
A clear pivot after Romance
Dopamine Chamber follows 2024’s Romance, which already marked a turning point for the Dublin band: a bigger, more electronic sound reaching past the indie-rock crowd that first embraced them. The new record pushes further in that direction. Frontman Grian Chatten has described the idea behind it as a room the listener steps into, where different mood- or mind-altering pieces of music are tested on them — hence the album’s title.
Eleven tracks make up the record, led by first single “Marianne,” released August 18 with a video directed by Dave Meyers that follows Chatten through a neon-lit house party where desire and paranoia blur together. The song has kept building since, including a BBC Maida Vale session, and is reportedly on course to become the band’s highest-charting single in the UK to date.
Rosalía, the surprise guest
The detail that’s traveled furthest since the tracklist dropped: Rosalía is credited on “Where Is Gone?” The Catalan star just wrapped a world tour behind her orchestral album LUX, a risky artistic bet that turned into a genuine global moment. Seeing her join an Irish rock band for a feature — the first Fontaines D.C. has ever put on an album’s actual credits — says something about where music stands in 2026: the lines between scenes that barely crossed a decade ago keep blurring with every major release.
Neither camp has said much yet about how the collaboration came together, which has only fed the curiosity around “Where Is Gone?” ahead of release. For a band that built its reputation on a tight, almost closed-ranks unit of five members, opening the door to a guest of Rosalía’s stature is as much a statement of confidence as a creative choice — proof that the band feels it can absorb a huge outside voice without losing what makes a Fontaines D.C. song recognizable in the first place.
A tour to carry the album forward
The album rollout continues straight into a European and UK tour: the first date lands October 21 in Lisbon, five days after Dopamine Chamber comes out, running through to a closing show on November 27 at London’s O2 Arena. It’s further proof of how far the band has come from the clubs they were still playing around the release of their debut, Dogrel, back in 2019.
The takeaway
With this fifth album, Fontaines D.C. are deliberately blurring their own image further: poppier in form, bolder in its collaborations, but still carried by Grian Chatten’s dark, lived-in writing. The question, come October 16, is whether the “dopamine chamber” concept holds up across a full album — and whether having Rosalía on the credits opens the door to more crossovers like it for a band that long cultivated a closed-off, us-against-the-world image.
